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It is 3am. I've bolted upright in bed again, cold sweat pouring down my face. I don't remember the details of the dream, and that is my only comfort. I only know the roots of my dream. Massage therapists and acupuncturists. I process their medical claims all day, and they haunt me in my dreams. And I feel that the only way to rid myself of this horror is to share it. And maybe find some relief in shared pain. (In order to not break federal privacy laws, I'm not using real names for the doctors or the patients. But these are all real claims that I have seen.) Claim 1: Very Overdue I can only picture the scene. A 63-year-old man has some abdominal discomfort. He goes to his local acupuncturist for treatment. His doctor examines him, and sticks some big scary needles in his armpit or something. In the end, he gives him a diagnosis that would shock even the most jaded among us. "Sir," he tells him, "Your pregnancy is far overdue. To treat this, I will stick needles in you." Neither of them seems to notice that a 63-year-old man should not have any pregnancy. But it must have been very overdue. After all, the doctor kept billing with that diagnosis code for almost a year. Claim 2:Time Travelling A teenager needs to see a massage therapist for some back pain. Nothing unusual there. The girl was born in 1983. Also nothing unusual. Like most teenagers, she is covered under a parent's insurance policy, in this case, her mother. Still not odd. Then I noticed the mother's date of birth. It was 10/3/96. The scenarios that could cause such a thing are mind-boggling. Maybe she was born in 1896, and waited until she was in her late 80's to start having kids. Maybe she's a step-mother, and the teenager's father is married to a 7-year-old. A 7-year-old who is apparently employed and has her own insurance. But what I think is that this mother travelled back in time from the future. She was born in 1996, grew to young adulthood, and perfected a time travelling device. With it, she went back to the early 1980's where she met a man, and had a child 13 years before she herself would be born. But think of the chaos she could cause with her cavalier time-travelling. Did she consider the consequences of changing the past? I propose that we find this 7-year-old, and stop her before she damages the future forever. Claim 3: Too Much Faith In Alternative Medicine They found the body lying in an alley, a blank look on her face. The police surrounded the scene with "police line" tape, and did chalk outlines and took photos. They didn't know if it was foul play or not, but that's what the coroner is for. After the autopsy, the coroner is stumped. He cannot figure out the cause of death. So he turns it over to the real expert. An acupuncturist. The acupuncturist arrives and deftly sticks needles all over the lifeless corpse, but to no avail. The cause of death is still unknown. "But don't worry," says the acupuncturist, "If you bring her back again next week, I'm sure another treatment will do the trick." Claim 4: So. Much. Wrong. I can't make up a cute story to go with this one. It's just too painful. I got a claim for a nice woman in her 30's. We'll call her Lucy. She had several back problems and other normal things. But it is the last diagnosis code on her claim that made me scream. She was given diagnosis code 878.1. Looks innocent until the description popped up on my screen. It is the code for an open wound to the penis. My mind reels with questions. Where did Lucy get a penis? Is it hers? Is it attached to her? How do you justify checking the box next to "F" for gender for someone who somehow, in some way possesses a penis? How did she injure her penis? Was it an accident? An infection? I'm not sure I want to know. Why is she treating an open wound with massage? Even a first-week massage therapy student knows that that's gonna infect it and make it bleed. There is no good in rubbing any kind of open wound. Which brings us to the most disturbing part. Doesn't rubbing a penis in any context kind of cross the line between massage therapist and hooker? I forever have an image etched in my mind of a hooker rubbing the bleeding penis of a hermaphrodite. All of the above claims were most likely caused by typos. So please heed my warning, and do not become a medical biller if you are dyslexic. One mistyped code can leave a patient bleeding or dying of monkey pox. If you know any medical billers, please tell them to proofread. It would really help me to sleep at night. |